Arrow of Gold - Page 2

throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of
Guipuzcoa. It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender's adventure
for a Crown that History will have to record with the usual grave moral
disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing romance.
Historians are very much like other people.

However, History has nothing to do with this tale. Neither is the moral
justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. If anything it
is perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects for his buried
youth, as he lives it over again at the end of his insignificant course
on this earth. Strange person--yet perhaps not so very different from
ourselves.

A few words as to certain facts may be added.

It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure.
But from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with
irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in
the café, Mills had already gathered, in various quarters, a definite
view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that
ultra-legitimist salon. What Mills had learned represented him as a
young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and
who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric
fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it
later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of
the Old Town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. He
pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already
credited with an ill-defined and vaguely illegal enterprise in the Gulf
of Mexico. At once it occurred to Mills that this eccentric youngster
was the very person for what the legitimist sympathizers had very much
at heart just then; to organize a supply by sea of arms and ammunition
to the Carlist detachments in the South. It was precisely to confer on
that matter with Doña Rita that Captain Blunt had been despatched from
Headquarters.

Mills got in touch with Blunt at once and put the suggestion before him.
The Captain thought this the very thing. As a matter of fact, on that
evening of Carnival, those two, Mills and Blunt, had been actually
looking everywhere for our man. They had decided that he should be drawn
into the affair if it could be done. Blunt naturally wanted to see him
first. He must have estimated him a promising person, but, from another
point of view, not dangerous. Thus lightly was the notorious (and at the
same time mysterious) Monsieur George brought into the world; out of the
contact of two minds which did not give a single thought to his flesh
and blood.

This purpose explains the intimate tone given to their first